Silence: The Future of Luxury?

The opening of the new V & A exhibition – What is Luxury? – has got the press into a lather this week trying to decide what constitutes the ultimate indulgence, and how it will be defined in the future. Surely the simple answer is ‘silence’ or at least the absence of irritating distractions. Has silence become the ultimate luxury good in our frantic world?

The author Mathew Crawford’s, whose new book The World Beyond Your Headis just out, says, “Figuring out ways to capture and hold people’s attention is the centre of contemporary capitalism. There is this invisible and ubiquitous grabbing at something that’s the most intimate thing you have, because it determines what’s present in your consciousness. It makes it impossible to think or rehearse a remembered conversation, and you can’t chat with a stranger because we all try to close ourselves off from this grating condition of being addressed all the time”.